CONNIKA

MIND-BOGGLING

It is no accident that when the apostle Paul was grappling with the eternal purpose of God for humanity, he chose the word "adoption" to describe it.  The basic idea of adoption is to include.  It means that one who is foreign, outside the family circle, is drawn, in grace and love, within the family circle.  And the purpose of that act of adoption is so that the outsider can share in the family's life.  The whole mind-boggling act of creation is driven by the desire to share the great dance with us.

The Great Dance - The Christian Vision Revisited (C. Baxter Kruger)

 

...WHEN GOD WAS ALONE...

What the doctrine of the Trinity is telling us is that God is fundamentally a relational being.  When we recite the Nicene Creed or the Apostle's Creed and affirm that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God, we are saying that there has never been a moment in all eternity when God was alone...The goal of the Trinity is inclusion.  The purpose of the Father, Son and Spirit in creation is to draw us within the circle of their shared life so we too can experience it with them.

The Great Dance (The Christian Vision Revisited)  C BAXTER KRUGER

 

ESPECIALLY IN THE WILDERNESS...

 

“To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness - especially in the wilderness - you shall love him.” 
― Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces

WHAT GIVES ME HOPE THOUGH...

What gives me hope, though, is that Jesus worked with whatever grain of faith a person might muster.  He did, after all, honor the faith of everyone who asked, from the bold centurion to doubting Thomas to the distraught father who cried, "I do believe;  help me overcome my unbelief!

Excerpt from Reaching for the Invisible God (Philip Yancey)

IF THERE WERE NO ROOM FOR DOUBT...

 

Buechner takes for granted that a relationship between an invisible God and visible humans will always involve an element of doubt.  Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt?  If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.

This quote from  Philip Yancey's Reaching for the Invisible God made me sit back and think today.  Can you imagine coming face to face with the creator of the heavens and the earth?  But God has made a way for us to come face to face with Him through Jesus Christ.  When we see Jesus, we see Him. 

 

ONLY VERY MUCH MORE SO...

...C S Lewis gives further illustrations of times when trust pays off, even in conditions that seem to argue against it:

In getting a dog out of a trap, in extracting a thorn from a child's finger, in teaching a boy to swim or rescuing one who can't, in getting a frightened beginner over a nasty place on a mountain, the one fatal obstacle may be their distrust.  We are asking them to trust us in the teeth of their senses, their imagination, and their intelligence.  We are asking them to believe that what is painful will relieve their pain and that what looks dangerous is their only safety.  We ask them to accept apparent impossibilities:  that moving the paw farther back into the trap is the way to get out - that hurting the finger very much more will stop the finger hurting - that water which is obviously permeable will resist and support the body - that holding onto the only support whthin reach is not the way to avoid sinking - that to go higher and onto a more exposed ledge is the way not to fall.  To support all these incredilia we can rely only on the other party's confidence in us - a confidence certainly not based on demonstration, admittedly shot through with emotion, and perhaps, if we are strangers, resting on nothing but such assurance as the look of our face and the tone of our voice can supply, or even, for the dog, on our smell.  Sometimes, because of their unbleief, we can do no mighty works.  But if we succeed, we do so because they have maintained their faith in us against apparently contrary evidence.  No one blames us for demanding such faith.  No one blames them for giving it.  No one says afterwards what an unintelligent dog or child or boy that must have been to trust us...

Now to accept the Christian propositions is ipso facto to believe that we are to God, always, as that dog or child or bather or mountain climber was to us, only very much more so.

Excerpt from

Reaching For the Invisible God (Philip Yancey)

NOW WE UNDERSTAND...

My roommate for two years at a Christian college was a German named Reiner.  Returning to Germany after graduation, Reiner taught at a camp for the disabled where, relying on college notes, he gave a stirring speech on the Victorious Christian Life.  "Regardless of the wheelchair you are sitting in, you can have victory, a full life.  God lives within you!" he told his audience of paraplegics, cerebal palsy patients, and the mentally challenged.  He found it disconcerting to address people with poor muscle control.  Their heads wobbled, they slumped in their chairs, they drooled.

The campers found listening to Reiner equally disconcerting.  Some of them went to Gerta, director of the camp, and complained that they could not make sense of what he was saying.  "Well then, tell him!" said Gerta.

One brave woman screwed up her courage and confronted Reiner.  "It's like you're talking about the sun, and we're in a dark room with no windows," she said.  "We can't understand anything you say.  You talk about solutions, about the flowers outside, about overcoming and victory.  These things don't apply to us in our lives."

My friend Reiner was crushed.   To him, the message seemed so clear.  He was quoting directly from Paul's epistles, was he not?  His pride wounded, he thought about coming at them with a kind of spiritual bludgeon:  There's something wrong with you people.  You need to grow in the Lord.  You need to triumph over adversity.

Instead, after a night of prayer, Reiner returned with a different message.  "I don't know what to say," he told them the next morning.  "I'm confused.  Without the message of victory, I don't know what to say."  He stayed silent and hung his head. 

The woman who had confronted him finally spoke up from the room full of disabled people.  "Now we understand you." she said.  "Now we are ready to listen."

Excerpt from

Reaching for the Invisible God  (Philip Yancey)

YOU DID FOR ME!

 

Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father;  take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.  For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?   When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you?   When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'

The King will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'

 

THE FIRST WAY AGAIN...

I am re-reading for the umpteenth time Marilynne Robinson's essay on Psalm Eight.  What a gift writers are to us, opening up what we see, hear and know in an ever deepening way.  Here she describes not only a seed falling to the ground, but the intention of the ground receiving it.  

...The families of both my parents settled and established themselves in the northern mountains, where there is a special sweetness in the light and grace in the vegetation, and as well a particular tenderness in the contact of light and vegetation.  We used to hunt for wild strawberries in places in the woods where there had once been fires.  These meadows, which for decades or centuries would hardly have felt more sunlight than the floor of the sea, were avid for it.  Because of the altitude, or the damp, or the kind of grass that grew in such places, they were radiant, smoldering, gold with transparency, accepting light altogether.  Thousands of florets for which I would never learn names, so tiny even a child had to kneel to see them at all, squandered intricacy and opulence on avid little bees, the bees cherished, the flowers cherished, the light cherished, visibly, audibly, palpably.

John Calvin says that when a seed falls into the ground it is cherished there, by which he means that everything the seed contains by way of expectation is foreseen and honoured.  One might as well say the earth invades the seed, seizes it as occasion to compose itself in some brief shape. Groundwater in a sleeve of tissue, flaunting improbable fragrances and iridescences as the things of this strange world are so inclined to do.  So a thriving place is full of intention, a sufficiency awaiting expectation, teasing hope beyond itself.

Marilynne Robinson (The Death of Adam, Essays on Modern Thought, Psalm Eight)

THE FINAL WAY

 

Thus, the final way he gladly chose to reveal himself is in his own Son, existing before the stars, who would become a limited human being with a body like me, an emotional life like mine, a thinking loving spirit, and a developing identity - consciousness like mine.  So Jesus begins life as an infant and grows up in a backwater town, takes up the carpentry trade, is called at the Jordan ford and teaches and heals and forms a small group of followers, dies and rises.  And precisely through this short life of carpenter and teacher, God the Father is revealed to the world in stunning clarity.  Jesus then is the great sacrament, symbol, revelation of the very depths of the incomprehensible God.  What Jesus reveals is the Father's love for us humans:  a self-giving love unto death, an unconditional love accepting our flawed condition, forgiving endlessly our weakness and malice.

Yes, all this is revealed, perhaps best in the Gospel of John, chapters 13 - 17.  God's crowning revelation is not, however, through Jesus' strength, his miraculous power, his awesome qualities, but precisely and paradoxically through his very weakness, his anguish and tears, through his cry of desperation on the cross.  We see a peasant trapped by religious authorities, pushed and shoved from one tribunal to another through a sham trial, beaten like a dog, crowned with insults, led like a bleeding animal to the Calvay rock, nailed to beams, stretched out against the sky naked, and dying like an animal.  This he would do for me.  In his agony he reveals to me who God is and how much God cares, this in a way I can never forget.  "Whoever sees me, sees my Father."...

Exerpt from A Traveler Toward the Dawn (The Spiritual Journal of John Eagan, S.J.)